CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Cleveland graphic novelist John Backderf, known by his pen name Derf in the comix world, hit the global best-seller lists in 2012 with "My Friend Dahmer," the tale of his adolescent friendship with Revere High School classmate and one-day serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. His latest novel, "Trashed," released this November, takes us on another offbeat ride, this time through the hidden world of trash collection.

Though "Trashed" is fictional, the idea was sparked by Derf's yearlong stint from 1979-80 as a garbage man in his hometown of Richfield, working on a trash truck named "Betty." It's a greatly expanded, 256-page re-imagining of a 50-page magazine comic he originally published in 2002. The 2002 story was nominated for an Eisner Award, the comics industry's highest honor.

The new-and-expanded "Trashed" is already creating a big buzz in publishing and comics circles both in the United States and Europe. It has been named one of the best books of 2015 by Entertainment Weekly and received glowing accolades from The A.V. Club and Publishers Weekly. The popular TED Talks technology-entertainment-design speaker series heralds it as one of the 58 recommended books of 2015.

Derf has been mining the everyday and the ordinary for stories for more than 25 years, telling tales of high school misfits, first jobs and more with jagged lines and punk-rock attitude.

He got his professional start as a graphic artist for daily newspapers, and worked for The Plain Dealer and Akron Beacon Journal. But he became Derf in 1990, launching his syndicated comic series, "The City." It ran for 24 years, mostly in alternative weekly papers in the United States, and earned him a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.

"I like telling stories people haven't told before; that's what I'm attracted to," says Derf, sitting at his desk in his home attic studio in Shaker Heights. He's wearing Chuck Taylors and a T-shirt adorned with a local radio station logo. It's a look very similar to the one he gave J.B., the scrappy, young garbage-truck captain of "Trashed."

Derf had dabbled in comics growing up, but says he got serious at age 10 when he picked up a Jack Kirby book out of boredom during a vacation in Ontario, Canada.

"I was totally mesmerized by it," he says. "I went back and bought more and more and more and cleared the whole rack. It was just that one, spur-of-the-moment impulse buy."

He built his career on "The City" strips, but found his niche in long-form storytelling.

"Trashed" opens as the tale of an irreverent slacker's new gig. But it seeps further into a piling crisis of waste with every grimy splash of garbage that hits J.B. and his truck cohort, Mike.

"I didn't want to be preachy, but I wanted to lay it out," Derf says. "I've always been fascinated with it because I was in the middle of it. Garbage just never stops. It keeps coming and you have to put it somewhere."

A black-and-white framed photo of the Richfield mayor tossing the ceremonial first bag of trash into a truck named Cyclops hangs over Derf's drawing board. It's been on the wall since he moved to Shaker in 1986.

Derf used his own experiences interacting with the Richfield townsfolk as a loose basis for animating J.B.'s conversations along the trash route. The garbage men of "Trashed" are seen but seldom heard, rendered all but invisible. But it's not just the workers who are out of sight, out of mind. The book's largest panel is a two-page spread dedicated to the landfill in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

Derf, an Ohio State University journalism graduate, visited local garbage operations, transfer stations and dumps to investigate the current state of trash. Dumps can be spooky places, says Derf, even the covered ones, which on first glance appear just to be grass-covered hills. He took his dog, Reilly, on a visit to one covered dump on the border of Brecksville and Broadview Heights.

The normally playful Reilly was "freaked out. He was shivering," says Derf.

"Trashed" may have its origins in Derf's late 1970s garbage collecting, but the themes still resonate in the novel's modern-day settings. The update was necessary, Derf says, to drive home its relevance.

"It became apparent that almost nothing had changed," says Derf. "There's a little more recycling, but everything else is exactly the same. Just sweep it off the street and it's 'gone.'"

Derf says he's always looking for "those universals" when writing a story, even a grim, seemingly aberrant tale like "My Friend Dahmer." An unnerving quote from Jeffrey Dahmer is plastered across the opening of the 2014 extended graphic novel release of that book, like a missed prophecy with a warning bell that never rang:

"When I was a kid, I was just like anybody else."

Derf says he did not pen "Dahmer" out of any sympathy for his old classmate. Rather, it was a chance to tell another side of a story. "My Friend Dahmer" delivers a jarring dose of reality, making it clear that distance between normal and abnormal is not all that great. It was intriguing enough to catch the eye of filmmaker Marc Myers, who is adapting the novel to film.

"Everybody went to school with someone who didn't fit in, who went off the tracks, who shoved along and people ignored them or made fun of them," says Derf. "I hear it time and time again, 'I knew someone who was just like Dahmer when I was in high school.'"

Much like "Trashed," the devil was in the details. Derf talked to classmates, pored over court records and scoured through transcripts. Interviews appear interspersed in the Dahmer story. "I can't say there were any signs that he was different or strange," says a school guidance counselor. Dahmer himself comments on the twisted desires that led to his downfall: "I don't know where it came from. I'll probably never know."

Derf often jokes that the Dahmer graphic novel was a poor choice of follow-up to 2009's "Punk Rock and Trailer Parks," a boisterous, comedic ode to small town underdogs of the late 1970s.

He'll be reviving "Punk Rock's" spirit in 2016. He's working on its sequel, "The Baron of Prospect Ave.," funded through his recent award of the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture's Creative Workforce Fellowship.

This year, two other comix artists, John G and Nathan Ward, also won the award, in what Derf commends as "a long overdue recognition of the comix scene we have here and the talent that Cleveland pumps out."

Derf describes "The Baron of Prospect Ave." as a "crazy story about downtown Cleveland in the 1980s, the era of the default and the grungy, dirty downtown Cleveland." It's set in sprawling Kay's Bookstore. Derf was a frequent visitor as a youth and loved the store's colorful, offbeat cast of customers and workers.

"It's gone now and people have forgotten it and I like bringing back things that were forgotten," says Derf.

"Another Rust Belt epic."

Video
of the Day

What are the 100 best restaurants in Greater Cleveland? Our eighth annual A-List Dining Guide recognizes a smorgasbord of restaurants in Northeast Ohio, covering fine dining to casual spots, that our reviewers think you should check out.